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Dominican Pentient Women. Edited, translated, and introduced by Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner, with contributions by Daniel E. Bornstein and E. Ann Matter. (New York and Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 316. $26.95 paperback.)
The "penitents" of Italy, along with the beguines of the north, stand as the prime examples of the important late-medieval form of lay devotion that scholars call "semi-institutional" or "semi-religious," in the sense that it did not demand the full discipline of membership in a religious order. As Herbert Grundmann has famously argued, the existence of such persons outside the established categories of religious life was deeply problematic for medieval Catholicism, and their relationship to the existing religious orders, especially in their movements' formative phases in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, tended to be unstable and ambiguous. In Worldly Saints (1999), Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner explored that relationship in the case of the female Italian penitents associated...